10 Steps To Boost Your Site’s Crawlability And Indexability Ep. 557

and we're live hi and welcome to the sdo podcast i know the secrets of internet marketing my name is chris burrs one of the owners of ewr digital you can you hear me hello we just did it just did the intro we're we're we're having some technical difficulties everyone i'm in mexico i am not and actually in our beginning it looked like my end might be causing the problems so i don't know exactly how that works uh we'll get through this uh i'll tend to keep talking i guess when it's my turn and then you keep talking and then we'll we'll we'll make it happen like this this this works well we we are we are adding some editing uh you know we're we i know it's a no editing rule but i think we're going to start actually editing a little bit of editing to our videos so people can appreciate that um so maybe this will be the first one this is this was edited for good reason welcome back to another fun-filled edition of the podcast we've got a great article today uh it's 10 steps to boost your site's crawlability and indexability as an seo or out there you understand how important that is and so we're gonna we're gonna go through that and and break it down and keep it simple before we jump into the article we want to talk about our sponsor uh se ranking uh you guys if you've listened to the podcast before you know a couple things about se ranking you know first that it's good uh and it's inexpensive uh it's professional and it's easy to use it has lots of tools and each of the tools could be sold individually by the way i checked out like some of the other tools and we're going to talk about one here in a second also you might not have heard have heard of se ranking but it has lots of industry awards and superb user rating uh patiff to se ranking if you want

to get a 30-day trial just go to bestseopodcast.com forward slash se ranking let me talk about this feature um it's the page change monitor and and matt i i this is basically a rhetorical question so don't answer it however have you ever gone to a page you've worked on and it's changed yes of course you have right like everyone has had that happen how nice would it be to have some piece of software that's visiting that page on a regular basis you just in enter the page it visits it maybe it's weekly uh and then lets you know if anything's changed on it so that you can keep an eye on it you know and maybe some things are supposed to change but you want to make sure that things that aren't supposed to change don't get changed uh and and one thing that se ranking did is they pointed out a cool kind of feature that you could use this service for which is i don't know maybe put in the page that is your competition's pricing so that you can keep an eye on if that ever changes right like that's useful information uh maybe just some of their marketing pages for your competition matt i don't know if you've ever checked that tool out uh but i know you use se ranking on a regular basis yeah no i have not used that tool um it sounds like a good kind of monitoring tool we check forms consistently uh for clients and sometimes when like wordpress doesn't update sometimes the database will screw everything up on the page um so i don't know exactly how this tool works but it sounds like there's some good monitoring uses as well as listening tools um that you could use it for um there's a lot of probably different ways you could use it um i i would just say se ranking really has good um keyword tracking uh they get up-to-date keyword tracking data so that's really nice i like their reporting um i

like their keyword uh like search tools so um a lot of different people use different tools i do like se rankings search tools and then um you know for for uh on-page research as well as uh ranking research um and competitor research se ranking is great yeah so definitely uh go out check se ranking their typical uh free trial is only 14 days we twisted their arms they're giving you guys 30 days again go to best seopodcast.com forward slash se ranking uh and that'll get you to the page where you can actually uh experience the 30 day trial i see that matt's dropped off uh at least this video did for a second so i'm gonna jump right in uh i couldn't find any reviews so if you guys could uh and we'll ask this again if you could go to youtube.com forward slash best seopodcast make sure you subscribe make sure you click the notification bell also go to instagram.com forward slash the best seopodcast uh make sure you connect with us there follow us there and then you can find us at tiktok.com forward slash at best seopodcast yeah and and chris we are getting a lot of comments on on different channels and we've been looking at different tools to manage um being able to to see all those tools in a timely manner and being able to respond uh but yeah only about 18 or 20 i don't remember the exact number uh actually uh listen uh follow us so please doesn't matter what platform you're on uh whether it's a podcast or a social media channel uh we we have some great shorts we put out some great content if you like this stuff please listen to it um you can always change your mind so very cool all right i'm going on there there were some comments there that i thought we might want to get rid of already um all right so let's jump into this article this is from brian frederick patiff to you brian frederick again

10 steps so so for anybody that's listening we're getting some spam on our live video chat uh because i did uh decide to try out video chat chat on uh twitch and so i think that that's where these are coming from it looks like it's coming from the user yeah chris i'll block the user and and hide it there you go yeah it looked like it was coming from youtube uh but i didn't know maybe it could it could it could be and i'm also in mexico so it will be showing it to probably different people potentially so yeah very interesting all right again 10 steps to boost your site's crawlability and indexability uh if uh let's start again patiff to brian frederick if search engines can't find your web pages all the optimization in the world will do you no good that seems pretty obvious uh there is a two-step process for the search engines to navigate and understand your site those two steps are called crawling and indexing as an seo professional you undoubtedly have heard of these terms but let's define these just to be certain uh crawlability refers to how well these search engine bots can scan and index your web pages so that's crawlability indexability measures the search engine's ability to analyze your website and add them to the index these are both obviously essential parts of seo if your site suffers from poor crawlability for example maybe too many broken links or dead ends search engine crawlers won't be able to access all of your content which will exclude that content that it can't access uh from the index that is a bad thing if you did not know um indexability on the other hand is vital because pages that are not indexed will not appear in search results how can google rank a page if it hasn't been included in the database um it can't like that it just can't that's the answer and i don't think people understand that so when people are building links uh or

citations or net listings in anything right if google doesn't index it it doesn't count for you as a benefit right and so a lot of times people are building links and really google's looking at the quality of content looking at the quality of links and it's deciding is this valuable or not because so much content to be creating all the time it's unindexing a lot of stuff we're finding new clients coming in a lot of their blogs are getting unindexed because it's repeating informations out there there's a lot of bots out there that rewrite a lot of content i know when i publish content bots rewrite my content pretty quickly um and so uh really google's trying to evaluate is is this valuable or not and again if it pulls it out of their indexing uh where basically people don't know this google uh is not live when you go to google and search you're you're searching uh basically a copy of what the spiders have done and index the internet right into their database so it's not actually live now it's gotten a lot faster it's picked up it's indexing stuff more and more quickly but it's not live so they're they're taking the internet they're deciding what's good they're deciding where to rank it based on like what users want to see and if your stuff's not in there it doesn't count and any links that are built to you if they're not indexed those don't count either so i think that that's something really important that people are not considering and that should be a step in any seos process to go double check the links look at the links that are falling off why are they falling off are they getting unindexed what's going on with them because you're you could be losing a really valuable uh link equity if if you don't do that so again if it's not indexed if it and if this well we'll get into crawling but if it's not indexed it doesn't count so yeah

make sure and all right and let's talk about you said the that should be an important step uh let's talk about 10 steps uh these are the 10 steps to boost your site's credibility and indexability uh so number one is improve page loading speed web spiders right those crawling bots don't have all day to wait for your links to load if your site doesn't load within the specific within a specific time frame they'll leave your site which means you'll remain uncrawled and unindexed this is again not good for seo purposes so chris i feel like if we added editing in right now we could have some little spiders crawling across the screen right yeah yeah maybe i don't know like i mean remember mice there's mice and then there's there's spiders like there's all kinds of bugs all through the internet web spiders yeah there's certainly bugs through the internet we've all experienced those yeah i think uh i spoke about breaking soccer.com uh because yeah um all right so it's a good idea to regularly evaluate your page speed and improve it wherever you can if your site is running slow right so you do some maybe you go to gtmatrix.com uh and you find out that it is running slow maybe do a lighthouse test uh if it is slow you need to take some steps to alleviate the problem uh these steps could include upgrading your server or hosting platform interesting we bumped into this regularly enough that we started a company cohosta.com where it's focused on this speed issue on seo focused uh technical aspects so that your website can perform the best so a little bit of a tangent but i think it's really important so gutenberg is something that we're really starting to invest in um it now it doesn't build a very high-end looking site i think that that's coming but it certainly builds a very light site and so uh for for larger sites informational sites um a lot of these builders have a lot of extra

code in them they make the sites really heavy they slow them down google really doesn't like that and so depending on um how high-end the site needs to look oh my gosh the sun's starting to hit me um you you should be looking at uh the like is there additional code is is the builder light and really the speed of the website super important and using um different services to look up that speed and also how the page is loading can be a whole podcast and i think we've done podcasts in the past on that specific topic but that is incredibly important it's probably one of the top uh ranking factors that that google looks for because no one sits around for longer than three to five seconds anymore for a website to live it's just painful and people jump they just they just bounce for sure uh so yeah so one go check out cohosted.com uh that's a not exactly what brian says but that's what we'll say um one and another thing enable compression minify your css so that's reduce your css as much as you can uh and in fact you're going to minify javascript and html uh and then eliminate or reduce redirects we would actually suggest that you eliminate them wherever possible so now look out for redirect loops right redirecting to a page that redirects that redirects back to the original page google hates that yes redirects yeah yeah that's a like that's a google death sentence all right number two strengthen internal link structure a disorganized website is difficult for search engines to crawl which makes internal linking one of the most important things an seo can spend their time on here's what google's search advocate john muller had to say about it by the way john muller you should listen to what he has to say very influential uh related to the we need to get him back on our podcast or we need to get him on our podcast he said he wanted to get on

and then we were like busy and then we need to get him back on yeah we should yeah reconnect with him that would be really good what he says and i quote internal linking is super critical for seo i think it's one of the biggest things that you can do on a website to kind of guide google and guide visitors to the pages that you think are important um make sure you create a logical internal structure for your site again this is not just for the search engines this is also for the user your home page should link to sub pages supported by pages further down the pyramid another thing to keep an eye on is broken links uh as they are harming your crawlability if you're if google finds a link uh there's nothing at the end of it you know if you've ever been in google search console it'll tell you about that but you can obviously understand that has a detrimental impact on your indexability yeah yeah well i just wanted to jump in on internal linking so uh really google's looking for when you look at a page because i think we talked about how it's important but maybe there's not actionable steps on what to do um the one way i would look at it is there's there's probably about 10 links if you want to look at that uh if you wanted to go that high from link equity that you can share with other pages and you can research like link equity but it's it's quite important you don't want to link out to something that's not valuable but when someone looks at a page okay they're trying to make a decision on that micro moment on what to do to get to the next step right and so you're trying to provide supporting information from other sources to reiterate what you're saying basically like citing uh other references to support what you're saying or to give them more additional information or additional more additional information uh that

doesn't make sense but giving them additional information to make the decision to take that next step of what you're looking for so when you look at a page you're like what is this page what do i want this to rank for what cta or what action step do i want them to take and then are any of the links on the page pointing to things that will help them make that decision to take that next step i can tell you that link internal linking are the links that you can actually control versus like off page where you might not have as much control right so internal linking i can tell you personally in low competitive industries or keywords i've been able to fully rank sites first page top positions without any outbound or sorry without any uh outbound links or back backlinks coming back to the site certainly i did link out to other uh references and sources that uh have some credibility but through the internal linking structure you can tell google and you're building a link every time you create that backlink on where you need to go on the site and what most people are doing is they're linking everything on the site to everything else and there's so many links google has no idea with the signals that you're creating what's important right where you want them to go what is the next step moving through the site where is the the customer journey and so internal linking is just incredibly important uh for the spiders for the users like you said but maybe that's a little bit more information around it where hopefully you've gotten some tangible steps that you can use that now to uh improve pages you're working on so yeah excellent yeah uh all right so number three of the 10 steps to boost your site's crawl ability and index ability submit your site map to google given enough time and assuming you haven't told it not to google and we'll talk about that here shortly google

will call crawl your site but it's not helping your search ranking while you're waiting for google to crawl the site so if you've recently made changes to your content and want google to know about it immediately it's a good idea to submit a site map to the google search console a site map is a is a file it's a separate file that lives in your root directory and it serves as a road map for search engines with direct links to every page on your site this is beneficial for indexability because it allows google to learn about multiple pages simultaneously make sure you have a site map so yeah you can have a site map for images and videos as well so uh not just text uh and then you know there are sites uh submitting it through the google search console but there's also other services out there that will help you submit and the thing that i like to use as like maybe a pro tip or even like for other marketers out there google loves to index youtube and google index youtube really really quickly so if you need a link uh to get indexed pretty quickly you can put it in the the notes of the video or the meta of the video and it'll get indexed so that's a little bit of approach that that's something that we utilize uh frequently so yeah yeah yeah uh so you're saying make a video in youtube and then have it linked to the page that you want to get indexed yeah i mean if you're if you're building something based on some type of content or some kind of a micro step that you're wanting someone to take uh having a video that supports that and then having that on the page is going to improve a lot of different metrics but also you can put the link of that page uh in youtube now youtube has started depending on the length of the link um chopping them off and they're not not

working so constantly things continue to evolve but youtube is indexing its own property uh or google's indexing its own property of youtube daily right and and i and i'm pretty sure it indexes the whole thing i'm not like 100 on that but but very very rapidly does it index everything so if there's something if there's a link in the meta that link's going to get picked up by google pretty quickly and um if you have other good meta surrounding that it's going to make it to uh their database right it's going to get it's going to get um uh what's the word but it's going to get added to the uh google search and then boom your links indexed so we mentioned uh in the last section that uh if unless you've told google not to index something which brings us to number four so this is number four of 10 steps to boost your sites crawlability and it says update robot.txt files you probably want to have a robot.txt file for your website 99 of websites use it if you're unfamiliar with what it is it's a plain text file in your website's root directory that tells search engine crawlers how you would like them to crawl or how you would like them to not crawl your website this comes in handy by limiting which pages google crawls and indexes for example you probably don't want pages like directories shopping carts and tags in google directory uh or even your admin side of your wordpress site in any way to be indexed so that's a pain downloadable right a pain downloadable or something like that i would even i i don't know if this article talks about or not i i looked at this article a week or so ago um humans.txt does it talk about humans.txt yeah so so this is something that not all sites are doing but uh you can put different information about the site um you know things that are maybe on your about us page or programmers information

things to give google confidence that this is a real company right because google is always looking for trust and it's looking for links to real people and there's also ways to add uh some of this stuff into uh your site um there's ways on like for their eat profile basically expertise authoritiveness and trust for different authors on blogs but the humans.txt file is something not every site uses but some of the bigger sites are using it and it it's a way to differentiate yourself to get more trust to say hey we are a real organization we are a real company because google doesn't want to show anything that well uh is spammy or uh could be a phishing scheme or something like that so it's just a another way to give google more trust signals yeah and i and i pulled it up so the this is just according to visitor analytics human.t humans plural.txt is a simple text file that can sometimes be found in the root directory of a website with a simple role of acknowledging the people who have worked on it which makes perfect sense when you're talking about um eat uh so here let's jump into some common mistakes in the robot.txt file uh one it's not in the root directory so google doesn't acknowledge it or it doesn't apply to things that might be in your root directory uh poor use of wild cards so you can have wild card characters and if you mess those up uh you can easily and i'll talk about this here in a second uh have uh no index uh you know have google skip an entire site uh no deck no index in robots.txt uh and then blocked scripts style sheets and images and then no sitemap url those are things that you want to make sure that you're addressing in your robot.txt i'm sure i told you this story matt but this is you know before we started working together we we got this new client they were real apprehensive about

making a change and when they finally made the change like their just fear was like hey they had pretty good ranking they were going to plummet and it was within about 10 days of making a change that they in fact plummeted and like well we hadn't hardly done anything yet so what in the world was going on and i remember we usually have beer uh beer fridays right so at about four o'clock we're drinking beer we're sitting around like like what is going on with this thing like racking our brains kind of teams uh you know and trying to enjoy a beer but certainly focused on this website that was plummeting and i decided to look at the robot.txt file and the previous company had put no follow the entire directory for so so of course like it told google don't index me or stop indexing me don't index me again and of course it plummeted so uh we fixed that and it came right back that happens a lot when people launch websites right they might be building the site on maybe not a dev server but they might be building it they don't want it indexed they make the site go live and then they forget to change it there um that needs to be in um the standard operating procedure or best practices of a site because well that's an issue if google can't index it uh it's a big big problem so when you're when you're launching a new site uh definitely um there's some things you need to check and that's one of them it really is your your biggest fear right like i'm maybe changing a company uh trying a new company or i'm actually launching a new website and i've got good position like well i don't care what happens as long as i don't lose any position and then that mistake causes like a severe position drop um and sometimes it's harder depending on the competitiveness of the industry sometimes it can be a lot harder to

get back to recoup that positioning um than it than it was so be mindful of that all all right number five check your canonicalization uh canonical tags consolidate signals from multiple urls this can be a helpful way to tell google to index the pages you want while skipping duplicates and outdated versions so yeah you want to you want to make sure hey i'm not going to update that page it was originally tied to this page this is the page google you should be indexing um this does open the door for rogue canonical tags these refer to older versions of a page that no longer exists so you really do need to be mindful and and it's kind of a behind the scenes thing you're not it's not in your face like hey this is the page here's the canonical tag you actually have to go back in the metadata and and look at those canonical tags uh to eliminate this problem use a url inspection tool to scan for rogue tags and remove them i don't know if you have anything to add uh are pretty important uh especially if you have a lot of pages where you're using very similar content so basically you're pointing to one page saying this is the page that's most important um and this is the page where the source of the information comes from um i think uh not canonicalizing pages is what hurts a lot of people's seo because then google starts saying well this is all dupe content this is not um valuable information it could start on and unindexing it so yeah for for sure and and just you know i think it's important to note that google has made it clear from the very beginning that dupe content isn't a penalty per se right and and i remember i actually wrote some kind of fairly complex software that was based on the uh i think it was the cities with a population of a hundred thousand or more in across the united states and

would automatically create these pages and a lot of those pages did rank right but only for that phrase in a city that wasn't that big and that uh then didn't have any competition in that particular area um so so it's it's not a penalty per se but it it doesn't uh it doesn't help you and and you can get bumped to the end if you don't canonicalize it uh the the proper way all right number six perform a site audit uh this starts with checking the percentage of pages google has indexed for your site so you can check this out uh in google search con console uh it's called your indexability rate your indexability rate is the number of pages in google's index divided by the number of pages on your website there's a good chance your site will have some pages you don't want indexed so this number likely won't be a hundred percent right uh but if it is in deck if the indexability rate is below ninety percent then you probably have some issues that you need to investigate yeah that's fair audit newly published pages uh anytime you publish new pages to your website or update update your most important pages you should make sure that they are being index indexed scale your audit process with tools like they're screaming frog there's zip tie on crawl there's also se ranking that you can use uh to audit your newly published pages um and and make sure that they're getting indexed yeah i i would say one of the things that's important to think about when you're launching new pages is um and i don't have a site where where this information is exactly published but this is the same for youtube and this is the same for a lot of social media platforms there is an audition period okay and we call it the google dance where when you launch new stuff uh or when you add content the pages google is going to move it around to see what um

the on page uh like analytics look like as far as like dwell time do people take action and click through are they clicking the back button um are they finding what they're looking for there's a lot of different metrics that google's looking for but typically that's measured uh in in the first let's say seven days or let's say even extend it to 14 days when you launch a site or or sorry when you launch a new page there is an audition period it's different for all the different platforms um it's different for google but getting uh good data on that page is important so if you're launching a new page you want to share it with your network you want to share it on social media maybe share it to a list but you want to give good uh you want to get good interaction data so just like this video if you are watching it please click on it please like it um please uh share it because it will help with the rankings for the algorithms on the different social media platforms and and and google itself so yep um all right so that was uh perform a site audit in order to check your indexability rate next is check for low quality or duplicate content so if google doesn't view your content as valuable to searchers it may decide it's not worthy of being indexed so thin content could be poorly written content boilerplate content content with no external signals about its value and authority uh duplicate content is another reason bots can get hung up while crawling your site uh sometimes this will trigger an alert alert in the google search console corrects these issues by fixing tags removing pages adjusting google access uh which is you know what you do with your robot.txt file so i would i would say um you know thin content uh certainly uh for blogs for example uh that number continues to rise uh typically it used to be like 300 characters and then it

was like 500 words or 300 words and then that number has gone up uh it's not rule of thumb you want to write whatever you're writing about to address whatever that issue is and then certainly you want to use the headers appropriately uh to understand uh the different subjects and topics and again those also help google understand what the page is about uh but the point that i'm trying to make here is that um typically thin content google does not like because it might not fully explain what someone's looking for i know there's a lot of articles out there that tend to stay short i'll give you an example i do write for forbes but i don't like that forbes doesn't allow you to put more content on there they're looking for just that quick skim or that quick read and when i read forbes i'm looking for the meat of what's going on and i can't really explain that uh in in so many words and if you look at google not saying it's rule of thumb but if you look at the data most of the pages that are ranking on the first page of google are 2000 plus words right now and that number continues to go up and so that's something to certainly consider uh when you're writing content so you don't want to you don't want to duplicate content you don't want to write a lot of fluff you want to get to the point because it's definitely attention spans are short online and you want to break it in into a way that's easily digestible but also a lot of times if you're not answering the question or you're not answering the question effectively uh google's uh gonna look at more of a a complete answer um that's why you see all these you know the the full guide or the unabridged version or everything because people want to look at one page and try to get the answer to what they're looking for so you just want to

make sure that you do that and typically um certainly if you're not articulate enough it might take well that's that's probably a wrong statement but um typically it sometimes takes more words to do that or more characters to do that yeah yeah if you're going to cover it comprehensively and that's really what you're saying let's have a comprehensive page that addresses what people and it's also organized in such a way like if i don't need to know the history of the word or the i don't want to understand where the word was born out of and and what you know roman soldier used it uh you know the most and i just want to know okay well what do i do about that um you want to have it organized enough that people can skim through it and get to that that content that they're actually looking for yeah i i would say that was a older seo tactic that that's certainly been modified right is everything there is to know about that one particular topic but i i still think you could um you know like let's say okay let's talk about podcasting because we're podcasting right now the history of podcasting you could still talk about the history of podcasting but you need to understand the customer journey and where that links to and if that's valuable that might be something in in in an index right or in a footer or in a page connected to this page that cites different sources or information where you're looking at it from a content cluster standpoint um but not on that page because you need to understand what's going on in that person's conversation when they come into the page what's that customer journey where are they at what are they trying to get the answer to to take that next step and that might not be absolutely relevant now uh having a glossary or um something like that or a content cluster related to a certain topic where you provide a comprehensive piece

of information or even uh uh like a a table of contents or um you know uh a directory that links to other things to incorporate that might be good but it might not need to be on that specific page so yeah yeah all right so number eight back to 10 steps to boost your site's crawlability and indexability number eight is eliminate redirect change and internal redirects um we talked about this a little bit already as websites evolve redirect redirects are natural byproducts directing visitors from one page to a newer or more relevant relevant one uh be mindful of relevant change they occur when there's more than one redirect between the link clicked and the actual destination page in more extreme cases you may initiate a redirect loop in which a page redirects to another page we've covered that uh check it with the screaming frog or some redirect uh checker uh redirect dash checker.org or a similar tool um yeah and this can this can happen right you launch a new page like you make a you make a structural change in the website so you do a 301 to this page right but that that original page still has um some external links that are coming back in and then you redo the page again and maybe you change it again so now you know to do a 301 redirect from the intermediary version but now you've got two hops for that first version you really need to go back and fix that first version so it only has one hop uh it's really important and i think i read at one point that each hop can have a 15 loss of uh and i don't know where that yeah yeah well i mean i i think you're talking about too you're changing the slugs right like if you're just changing content on the page that's a little bit different but if you're trying to redirect them to another page or you create a new page and you're directing to that old page and

you're changing those slugs yeah like you don't you don't really want to do that you want to prevent that if you can um a lot of times people redirect to one redirect another redirect and and then that that increases the load time right of having to redirect load that page oh that script gets run it it redirects over here so that hurts the user experience as well um and and certainly uh yeah it's like 10 to 15 i think actually that number is 15 that you lose that link equity so if you redirected it twice the strength of that link of pushing that seo juice through there or link equity goes down significantly so uh really again the the measure measure twice cut once um it's really important so proper planning helps you um like reduce the number of redirects that you have to have um and uh yeah redirects are just really really not good broken links are are worse um and so these are something it's funny that you mention broken links because number nine is fixed broken links uh broken links can obviously wreak havoc on your site crawl ability you can use google search console analytics or scheming for there's lots of tools out there that you can use to find four or four errors um i we've got a habit of tracking four or four errors anytime a website is launched uh because you may just miss have missed a 301 redirect and so your your website's spinning off four or four pages the sooner you can catch those the better uh and get them fixed the better so they don't see any kind of detrimental uh loss of placement well i would also say that um if you're linking out to different pages um there's a certain amount of deterioration i don't know if that's the right word uh in just the overall internet structure uh that links break links die uh and if you're linking out to stuff or or you have content that uh you've linked out

to stuff they could they could change that and not do a proper 301 or the site may not be maintained and and it it just degrades right and so uh we we do every quarter uh for our clients audit to make sure that we're catching all that stuff certainly uh to maintain a site uh even even more um robustly uh once a month i think is is really quite good but we found that like if you're catching everything on a quarterly basis uh unless you've made a lot of changes to a website you're not going to find a lot of 404 errors i think off another tangent a little bit there's a lot of people out there that are selling um citation services where they're checking the citation degradation monthly right and i'm like you know okay six months okay a year but every month like you think someone's going to go uh change the citation every month and you're going to charge somebody 20 bucks plus to monitor that um i you know like you got to balance you got to balance what what makes what makes sense and then you know what's likely to happen versus what could happen that's maybe a little bit of overkill that might be a little bit more of a money generation thing in my opinion so that's just something to look for and so the final step here on you know 10 steps to boost your site's crawlability and indexability i hadn't heard of and it's called index now it's a relatively new protocol that allows urls to be submitted simultaneously between search engines via an api uh really brian says implementing it is easy and only requires you to generate an api key hosted in your directory and or another location and submit and submit your urls in the recommended format uh just a quick search under search engine journal says it's an open source protocol that allows website publishers to instantly index across participating search engines updating results based upon the latest content changes uh

so that's index now awesome well i am we're going to have to wrap up i got to get going actually i have some dinner plans so look are you are you looking over my show that says wrapping up it's essentially check your site for anything you could be waylaying misleading or misdirecting bots so get yourself a good set of tools and get started patiff to you brian uh for this really good thanksgiving holiday everyone that celebrates it yeah and uh and remember youtube.com forward slash best seo podcast instagram.com forward slash the best seo just find us just find us best seo podcast until the next podcast my name is chris burris my name is matt bertram bye-bye for now